On Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, Jonker Street in Melaka becomes a night market. There are hundreds of vendors, plus shops set up cats out on the street to sell stuff. It is so lively! And unlike in Kuala Lumpur’s Alor Street, we didn’t find white people asking for money to fund their travels around the […]

I originally thought that the name of the river in Melaka was Sungai. I looked it up later, though, and discovered that ‘Sungai’ means ‘river’, so Sungai Melaka is simply Malacca (as it is still sometimes spelt) River. Especially as sleepy Melaka shuts down early on non-market days, the river cruise is a charming thing […]

Taman Negara was incredible, and my mind is still full of the wonder of the forest. Yet, we did have to say goodbye to it when it was time to move on to Melaka. And Melaka was incredible too. A world apart from Taman Negara, I think it was the first city outside India where […]

For the most part, I dislike treks. I don’t think I’m lazy, though I cannot really be sure. I just don’t like pushing myself up a hill, or feeling undercurrents of sympathy when some people don’t walk/climb as fast as others. Sure, everyone is nice. People help other people out. It’s just that my body […]

We read a lot about the night walk at Taman Negara before we left India. Most people said that it was a waste of time and money and that all you could see were spiders and insects. That did not deter either of us. Honestly, I did not expect to see an elephant in the […]

I’m always amused by how the concept of distance depends so much on where people live.“The canopy walkway is very close, just about half an hour or maybe a little more.” That’s what we were told when we bought our 5 ringgit tickets to the canopy walkway. For most people I know, 1.8 km does […]

I don’t know how people decide what they want to visit in a new country. India, I would think, is particularly difficult, if only because it is so large. Does one do history-things, or nature-things, or things other people have talked about? Or does one simply go visit people one knows? In Malaysia, we had […]

Travelling is all about the stories you make, isn’t it? Our Malaysia visas formed yet another story. We chose to go to Malaysia practically on a whim. Though the Scholastic Asian Book Award shortlist was released just a few weeks before the Asian Festival of Children’s Content, we were determined not to visit just Singapore […]

I come from India, a land of contrasts, I know. I might once have been presumptuous enough to say the land of contrasts. I see so many contradictions everywhere that I should be used to them. I remember shrugging at French friends who asked me who would go to South City Mall in Kolkata to drink tea […]

Part of the joy of travelling is writing about everything I see. My diary has pages and pages of random things that strike me. I remember something I wrote about in 2004 when I went to France on an exchange programme. When we were checking in, we were told at the counter to preserve our ticket […]